Personal profile

Biography

Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah

Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah is a consultant physician in general medicine and infectious diseases at Alfred Health, Melbourne who completed her PhD on the health and economic burden of invasive fungal infections, antifungal stewardship, and the role of data analytics in making surveillance of fungal infections feasible, sustainable and cost effective for hospitals.. She has led a project in collaboration with Monash University Faculties of IT and Engineering, to develop a world first platform technology based on AI (fungalAi) that can facilitate real time monitoring of fungal diseases in hospitals. The platform includes natural language processing, deep learning based image recognition of fungal diseases on chest imaging and an expert system that integrates clinical data to improve fungal prediction. The platform is being trialled across multiple Australian hospitals. In 2019, she was awarded a TRIP (translating research into practice) fellowship by the Medical Research Future Fund for "fungalAi: breaking the mold of the traditional antifungal stewardship paradigm". Her research interests in general medicine relate to the impact of occupational violence and aggression in hospitals.